I

fell in love with the idea of contradiction when I stumbled upon Alexandre Kojéve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel at the UCL Library on a cold autumn afternoon. The material sensations of holding the book have preserved this moment in my memory: the lovingly-made hard cover with its fabric coming out; the dusty smell that starts with the passing of the page and settles down slowly until you pass it again; the remnants of the many hands that have gone through these pages, underlining some passages without giving any thought to what future readers will think of it. I can feel the contents of the book grabbing me from the inside, moving me towards a debate around the notion of contradiction and the possibility of change.

Embracing contradiction may be the only avenue for progressive climate change action. This is the central argument that I present in the paper "Contradiction, intervention and the low carbon transition," recently published in Environment and Planning D. The ideas in this paper emerged from a sense of frustration with current debates about the governance of climate change. I had long observed that "contradiction" was frequently invoked in discussions of climate change governance, but rarely defined. I was sitting at a meeting discussing urban sustainability transitions, when a colleague referred to "contradiction" to explain away the paradoxical nature of climate change governance in a certain exemplary European city. This upset me. Like in other occasions, invoking contradiction was a means to end the discussion, rather than to open it up. Reviewing the literature on climate change governance, I struggled to find a coherent means to make sense of what contradictions were and why they mattered.

Until I found, pretty much by chance, Kojéve’s book on Hegel. I read it first out of a sense of curiosity, mostly because there is a part of me which yearns to open dusty covers of books. However, once I read this book, I found myself drawn into its ideas in a manner that I never felt before, not even reading Hegel’s own Phenomenology of the Spirit. Kojéve established a bridge between Hegel’s and my own thinking, and in doing so, it revolutionized everything I ever held sacred about contradictions and the possibility of progressive action in the context of global environmental governance.

The book consists of notes from Kojéve’s lectures, as compiled by one of his students, Raymond Queneau. The editor and his publishers produced a layout and formatting that evokes the spoken origin of the book, with annotations, block notes and jumps between sections. Despite the complexity of its arguments, this is a carefully crafted story that can be easily verbalized. Kojéve’s Introduction to Hegel stands in tribute to a distinguished teacher as much as the distinguished students who helped him to discuss and refine his understanding of the Phenomenology of the Spirit. Kojéve’s book on Hegel is not just a revealing read: it is also a loving tribute to how people learn and fall in love with complex ideas. When I finished the book I could think of nothing else than of contradiction as "an engine of change."

The memories of these impressions are interspersed with another story about intellectual development, which explains why I was worried about these issues at this particular time. As academics we are always able to situate our thinking within particular fields or debates. Explanations of the chain of thought that lead to a particular question or interest are less common. Moreover, the chain of thoughts underlying an argument can only be understood through the perspective we adopt today, a posteriori. Hence, this post attempts a reconstruction of the intellectual development story behind this paper, a posteriori. It focuses, particularly on how I came to see contradiction as a fundamental concept structuring climate change governance.

Looking for opportunities for action in climate change governance

The paper argues that contradictions may open up opportunities to engage with climate action in a manner that seeks to advance progressive goals, rather than reproduce existing environmental injustices. This argument emerges from a normative concern with finding out "what to do" for climate change. In practice, this question is not about who should do something but who can do something about climate change. This question is related to the obvious difficulties to match our knowledge of a particular issue (the accounts we tell to make sense of it) to the possibilities of intervention in a particular area (what we can do about it). There are three responses to this problem of authority, as far as I can see. An immediate response is to simplify the problem, accept that knowledge is limited, and act within the remit of operation of what we know. This is a common approach adopted in many city and climate change plans. Most climate change plans at the city level started by bringing together activities which were already taking place in the city, learning from previous experiences of air pollution management and disaster risk management and using that to plan the future (Carmin, Anguelovski et al. 2012).

Another response is experimentation. Experimentation is a dominant trend in climate change governance. Experimentation is what we see a lot of people in the climate change arena doing: trying things. Trying things is important to learn about things, to reduce complexity and begin action. Trying things is in itself a means to build authority, to establish what can be done and hence, what should be done about climate change. This is particularly important in cities where there is a need to link established ways of dealing with the management of the city to the demands of new global problems.

Simplification and experimentation often go hand in hand together. They are ways of doing things. Not everything is technological innovation, green economies and massive amounts of finance. The most effective work is done in a myriad of actions by those who are passionate and understand the context in which they work. Most of all, simplification and experimentation constitute an alternative to despair.

This was the philosophy behind the project of adaptation planning in Maputo, Mozambique (Castán Broto, Ensor et al. 2015). The project adopted an experimental approach to implement a participatory planning project to demonstrate how people could engage in planning for climate change in their city. A key issue in the project was to show that local people may have in depth knowledge of their neighborhood conditions. To bring this into a climate change framework, the team that I was leading developed planning methods in which information extracted from downscaled climate models was introduced in relation to local experiences of flooding. The project was successful in some ways. For example, members of a local community organized themselves to clean the drainages following the recommendations they themselves made during a participatory planning process. Simplifying knowledge, relating it to lived experiences, and finding out who can do something about it became means to begin positive action for climate change.

However, a key lesson from the critical study of experiments is that the impacts of experiments are ambiguous (see also: Bulkeley, Castán Broto et al. 2010, Bulkeley, Castán Broto et al. 2014). This is particularly important if we think of climate change in terms of justice and responsibilities. For example, in Maputo, initiatives in local communities overlook the exploitative means of governing that produce inequalities in service provision. Working with communities is a convenient means for governments to deflect responsibilities for basic services in areas which are thought of as informal. Experimentation is open-ended and as such, it may help to reinforce the conditions that led to unequal production of carbon emissions in the first place. To simplify and to experiment are good recipes for starting action but they do not tell you what the consequences of the action will be, because in each case those consequences will depend on the experiment itself, how it is transformative and what it transforms.

Contradictions in climate change governance

This may lead us to despair again. We may know how to start action but we cannot be sure of the consequences of such action. One initial realization is that despair in the governance of climate change is related to a number of contradictions. Take the example of Maputo. A participatory planning project cannot be developed without actually acting in manners that reinforce existing inequalities. For example, participatory planning may rely on the support of existing forms of community organization that silence some voices in favor of others. Fostering community participation, and empowering people, may lead to processes that attribute them responsibilities (from managing waste to cleaning drainages) which should be thought of as public services.

More generally, is there not a fundamental contradiction in the way we are tackling climate change as a problem for the green economy? In this way, climate change action is associated with more investment and more consumption. The green economy represents a contradiction because it aims to reproduce the economic system that led to the problem in the first place.

Contradictions in climate change governance are not exceptions, however. They are the root of climate policy. They are climate policy. For every policy you can trace a contradiction at its heart. Contradiction is not a reflection of our wicked ways with resources, but rather, it emerges from the problem of authority which I indicated above. It emerges from our need to match the stories we tell about climate change with what we can do about it. There are no clean solutions which will save the world because each solution is embedded in a set of contradictions. But as I said above, this is not about closing conversations. It is about opening them. Because an analysis of contradictions is a means to find direction in climate change action (Castán Broto, 2015).

Concluding thoughts

This story about how I came to regard contradictions as central for climate change governance is also a story about how dusty covers of books can contain the most intellectually stimulating surprises. Sadly, in the writing of this post, I have discovered that Kojéve’s Introduction has been moved away from UCL’s main library to the store, meaning that any scholar of Hegel will need to order the book and then wait for it 24 hours to read it. No more discoveries then. I am sad for all the future students who will not read this book, as much for the hundreds of book that I am myself missing.

Kojéve’s asks to abandon negative views of contradiction. This is why I emphasize the notion of contradictions as engines of change. Contradictions move us towards trying to find better means of intervening. After engaging with Kojéve’s work, my aim became to find an optimistic way to engage with contradiction as a means to develop progressive forms of governance. Experimentation may be key to find new ways of intervening, but contradiction is what shows a progressive direction of action. The bad news is that to tackle climate change policy in urban areas we need to move away from the safety of technocratic and efficiency-focused approaches that do not seek to challenge the conditions that lead to contradictions. As long as optimist thoughts of this kind do not get confined to unreachable stores. 

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References

Bulkeley HV, Castán Broto V, Hodson M, and Marvin S (2010) Cities and Low Carbon Transitions. London: Routledge.

Bulkeley HV, Castán Broto V, and Maassen A (2014) Low-carbon transitions and the reconfiguration of urban infrastructure. Urban Studies 51(7): 1471-1486.

Carmin J, Anguelovski I, and Roberts D (2012) Urban climate adaptation in the global south planning in an emerging policy domain. Journal of Planning Education and Research 32(1): 18-32.

Castán Broto V (2015) Contradiction, intervention, and urban low carbon transitions. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33(3): 460-476.

Castán Broto V, Ensor J, Boyd E, Allen C, Seventine C, and Macucule DA (2015) Participatory Planning for Climate Compatible Development in Maputo, Mozambique/Planeamento participativo para o desenvolvimento compatível com o clima em Maputo, Moçambique. London: UCL Press.

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See Vanessa Castan Broto's most recent contributions to Society & Space: Contradiction, intervention, and urban low carbon transitions